Wow, I just read through the posts and I'm really excited about some of the ideas here!
Some thoughts:
- The way the tasks are split up right now might make things difficult to manage from a workflow standpoint. For example, if someone is coding how the camera/character controls will work (probably one of the first things to do), they're going to have to have finished character animations to work with pretty early on. Placeholder animations will only go so far especially if you have to jump back and forth between tweaking the animation and editing the scripting.
- One way of handling it might be to have the person doing character animations also be responsible for coding main character interactivity.
- Another issue I'm running into with my MRP right now is the fact that I don't know what I'll be able to do with the software yet, making the design of certain features difficult. For the game, I would imagine it to be almost impossible to design the whole game without first knowing what's realistically feasible from a technical standpoint. This might mean that the design will have to change as the project progresses and it might be hard to keep everybody's work synchronized and on the same page. It also makes coming up with a detailed project timeline very hard to write up.
- With respect to the game itself, what is the core concept that the player is supposed to learn from playing it? It might be better to narrow down a specific topic to focus on and then design gameplay around teaching that, as opposed to deciding out how the game is going to play and then weaving a message into the experience.
Don't get me wrong, I am CRAZY excited about this. Just throwing ideas out there.
THIS GAME BETTER HAPPEN!!!!
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IT WILL HAPPEN! hopefully..... and I think we're going to meet Monday after patho to talk about all these nit-picky stuff.
ReplyDeleteOn your 2nd and 3rd points, I think that what we had decided (and Michael please clarify if I'm wrong) is that we will have to specialize because of the nature of a course. So going back to the example of Wensi and me... We will focus on character animation/rigging. And at the end of the term, we will have maybe created a small environment wherein our character can explore. Going into scripting as well would have to be on our own time.
So essentially, these special topics courses will give us the necessary tools and skills to make a game. It will also help us focus our goals, etc. However, we may not necessarily create elements of our final intended game through this course.
But, because of this, it may all still work out. As you said, we're going to have to tweak and revise our project as we learn more about the process. We can capitalize on the special topics courses as means to acquire skills and build a strong foundation and concept for our game. I still think the best analogy is a study versus a repertoire piece (piano nerds anyone?). Through the course, we'll make studies. Then after, we'll build our master piece!
Also, your last question, I ThInK the general idea was to aim to create something like a lymph node city (sometime by the end of the course until the AMI). It'll be a small contained 3D environment where we can have our character(s) (whatever they may be) interact. Here, we'll test our concepts etc, and if all goes well, we can expand the world around this lymph node later on.